With the world's first MOOOOO-C, you will gain a broad and comprehensive understanding of all aspects of dairy management such as genetics, nutrition, reproduction, animal health, farm economics, and sustainability of dairy production systems. There's something here for everyone whether you are just looking for the basics or have years of experience in the dairy industry.
This is an eight-week course. Each week consists of four to nine video lectures, additional reading materials, and a multiple-choice questions quiz. Estimated study time is between three and five hours per week. Learners have the option to purchase a Course Certificate for 49.00 USD. The certificate can be purchased at any time, but you must verify your identify before taking the course quizzes in order to be eligible. For those who cannot afford the certificate fee, financial aid is available through Coursera.
Why is producing milk efficiently and sustainably so important?
Milk provides humans with over 16 essential nutrients, such as: Energy, Protein and Essential Amino acids, Vitamin A, Vitamin D, several B vitamins, including B12, Pantothenic and Folic acids, and essential minerals such as Calcium, Magnesium, Phosphorus, Potassium, Zinc, as well as other minerals. Did you know that one glass of milk provides a 5-year old child with 21% of his/her daily protein requirements and 8% of their energy needs?
Most milk in the world, about 85%, is produced from cattle. However, water buffaloes, goats, sheep, and camel are also dairy animals. The United States, India, the European Union, Brazil, and New Zealand are among the largest dairy producers in the world. Yet among these dairy-producing countries there are varied methods to generate milk with highly variable productivity and efficiency. Dairy production is vital for the survival of billions of people. Globally, around 150 million small-scale dairy households, equivalent to 750 million people, are engaged in milk production. The number and size of dairy farms varies among countries, but in India alone, there are estimated 78 million dairy farms! In the United States, one of the leading milk-producing countries in the world, total milk production has been steadily increasing in the last decades, reaching over 205 billion pounds (93 billion kilograms) in 2014. This was accompanied by a steady increase in average milk yield per cow, reaching 22,260 lb (over 10,100 kg) per lactation in 2014. How has this efficiency been achieved? What methods are necessary to ensure production of high quality milk? How do we balance milk production efficiency with animal health and environmental protection? This course will provide the student with information to better understand dairy production systems and their role in feeding the world population.
In this MOOOOO-C, you will learn about the dairy enterprise from internationally recognized dairy science professors who have delivered highly regarded dairy education programs within the United States and internationally.
Course lectures are translated into Portuguese and Chinese; PDF files of these translations can be found under each course week. The Dairy MOOC team thanks Dr. Antonio Branco (Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Brazil) and Ms. Yuanyuan Zhang (Pennsylvania State University) for translating the lecture materials.
Course Sponsors
This course was supported by the generous contributions of Innovation Center for US Dairy at Silver Level and Pancosma North America, RP Nutrients, Inc. and Arm and Hammer, which provided funding support at a Bronze Level. The Pennsylvania State University has final responsibility for the academic content of this course.

CT

I've been working on dairy farms over forty years. There's always something to learn. Love this course. Great informational videos and reading.

QQ

Nov 22, 2016

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I have found this course very informative and got a lot of information through this course. I recommend all related people to join this course.

À partir de la leçon

Nutrition Basics, Requirements, and Feeding of Lactating Cows

This week you will be introduced to the principles of animal nutrition, basic nutrients and their metabolism, sources for these nutrients in a dairy diet, the anatomy of the digestive tract of a ruminant animal, the wonderful world of the rumen microbes, and major end-product of ruminal fermentation. Further, you will learn about energy and protein metabolism and nutrition, and nutrient requirements and their importance in feeding dairy cows. In the last segment of Week 4, we will discuss the life cycle of a dairy cow, lactation curve, grouping strategies, diet formulation basics, typical sources of energy and protein in dairy diets, will touch on mineral and vitamin nutrition, summarize nutritional recommendations for the various stages of the lactation, and diet preparation techniques. Those of you, who would like to get more engaged in discussions and are interested in completing the Course Certificate requirements, can participate in discussion forums and take the weekly quiz. Enjoy this week's material and the entire course!

Gabriella A. Varga

Chad Dechow

Robert Van Saun

Kathy Soder

Research Animal Scientist

James Dunn

Professor of Agricultural Economics

Lisa A. Holden

Associate Professor of Dairy Science

Transcription

[MUSIC] Hello, my name is Alex Hristov, and I'm professor Dairy Nutrition at Penn State University. As discussed in our previous lectures energy is the most important nutrient for lactating cow. Think of energy as the fuel you pump into your car which feeds the engine, and allows the car to speed up the highway. But just like the engine of a car can use only about 35% of the energy in gasoline the cow can use only a fraction of a total or gross energy in feed stuffs. Some of that gross energy will be washed in feces, some will be washed in urine, some will be belched out with fermentation gases generated in the rumen, some will be lost as heat merely to maintain body temperature and for various body functions, and finally after we take all of these energy losses out there will be energy left to fuel the metabolic processes required to keep the cow alive and to produce milk. This lost form of energy is called net energy or net energy rotation, and it's abbreviated NEL, and is the unit used to define energy content feeds, define energy requirements, and formulate that for dairy cows in the United States. Some energy systems used metabolisable energy or ME as an energy unit. The termination of MEF or metabolisable energy of feeds is a very difficult, but necessary process if we are to accurately feed animals and meet their energy requirements. Different feeds depending on their qualities will provide different amount of net energy to the cow. For example, ground corn grain will have around 1.7 megacalories net energy of lactation per kilogram. Whereas alfalfa silage will have around 0.6 meta calories per kilogram. Why the difference? The difference comes from the fact that around 70% of the common grain starch whereas the main energy carrying nutrient in alfalfa sage is fiber. Around 30% of its dry method. If we burn one gram of starch and one gram of fiber they will produce about the same amount of gross or total energy. The instrument shown here is an aerobatic bomb calorimeter, and is used to measure gross energy content of feeds and other materials. It is based on determining the heat of combustion of materials. Let's do a small experiment. We'll take the same amount of ground corn and ground alfalfa silage, and burn them in the calorimeter. Following the strict experimental protocol we have determined that our grain has a coercing value of 6,867 BTUs per pound, which after correction for dry method content and conversion is 4.4 mega calories per kilogram. The haulage has a coorig value of 7,478 BTUs per pound, or 446 meta calories per kilogram. Thus these feeds have very similar gross energy but vastly different net energy of rotation content. Another important point here is that we can calculate the coefficient of conversion of gross energy to net energy, which for corn grain is 39%. This is 1.7 divided by 4.4, and for alfalfa silage is only 13% this is 0.6 divided by 4.6. This difference represents the much greater losses of feed energy in feces, rumen femernation, gasses, and heat from fibrous feeds compared with starchy concentrates. It also demonstrates the importance of using net or metabolizable energy for formulating diets for ruminant animals. The other important nutrient in dairy cow diets is protein. The cow does not have requirement for protein per say, but for amino acids. For convenience however, and because we have not refined the individual amino acid requirements of dairy cows the way we have for pigs and poultry we formula diets based on metabolism property, which I'll define here. Proteins that are ingested with the feed undergo transformations in the rumen before they reach the absorptive sites in the wall of the digestive tract of the cow. The sum of proteins that reach the small intestine and are further digested and absorbed providing amino acids to the cow are termed metabolizable protein, or MP. It consists of ruminally degraded proteins or RDP, which we discussed in our previous lectures that is converted into microbial protein, feed protein that has not been degraded into rumen or RUP, and also endogenous proteins which originate from various endogenous sources such as, cells from digestive tract, digestive enzymes, and other proteins secretions. So what is a nutrient requirement? Simply the lactating cow needs nutrients such as energine, protein to leave, breathe, move, give birth to a healthy calf, and last but not least produce milk. The cow has nutrient requirements or functions such as maintenance, milk production, pregnancy only during the last trimester, and growth particularly during her first rotation. All these are combined to represent the nutrient command requirements for a particular cow, or group of cows. In the next lecture we'll further discuss nutrient requirements, and I'll give you a specific example of how we calculate energy and protein requirements of a lactating cow. [MUSIC]